


Binding Ties

by kats_meow



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Alternate Angel Season 3, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Grief/Mourning, Love and Recovery, Past Torture, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, RIP Buffy, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:20:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21808105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kats_meow/pseuds/kats_meow
Summary: "He goes, Dawn. Your days of being vamp sat are officially over."  With those words, the Sunnydale Scooby gang sans Slayer banish Spike to L.A. in the hopes of giving Dawn Summers a "normal" life after the death of her sister, Buffy.  Spike arrives on Angel's doorstep with the understanding that he's an extra flex of muscle for their crew to earn his keep - no more.  While Spike would never dust himself on purpose because of his promise to Dawn, it won't be his fault if some demon finishes the job for him, finally ending his suffering of enduring in a world without Buffy in it.  Then he catches the glimpse of a traumatized girl out of the corner of his eye and what's left of his life won't ever be the same.
Relationships: Winifred "Fred" Burkle & Spike, Winifred "Fred" Burkle/Spike
Comments: 21
Kudos: 37
Collections: Buffyverse Top 5





	1. Chapter 1

_Listen, listen, listen…_

_The walls talk here. Not like the cave walls did, but they carry on conversations with you if you let them. Everything has a voice. The letter that arrived this week, that hides in the top drawer of the bureau, shrieks almost as loud as her own cries at night. No one hears and yet she hears them all._

_“The girl's trading one cave for another. How strong is that?”_

_Easy for a princess to say._

_They don’t know how there’s strength in silence. Alone in Pylea, she’d been the strongest she’d ever been; the quietest, too. If you could stay very quiet, you could almost disappear into the shadows and become part of the darkness itself. The dark here is more frightening because it lies. At least there, in that cave, things were more honest. Shadows in the dark meant monsters hiding and waiting for you, simple as that. You could be quiet or you could run or you could lie down and take it. Be one with the dark and the silence and be very still while the monsters screamed for you._

_Handsome man saved me from the monsters._

Angel saved Fred from all of them, even the one that she really wanted: the one in him.

***

“He’s not a monster!” Dawn argued, her face florid with anger. “He’s the very last thing I have that I love and you’re taking him away from me!”

Willow and Xander exchanged worried looks. Dawn managed to capture, with her folded arms and defiant pout, the very image of the girl they’d been mourning those last few months. Dawn seemed to know exactly the memory she’d evoke for them in striking that pose.

Tara sat down next to the younger girl and put her arm around her. “Dawnie, I know this isn’t going to be easy. We’re really acting for your own good, though. Please understand that.”

“Tara’s right,” Willow added, trying to smile. “You still have us, sweetie.”

Dawn gave her a withering look. “Lucky me.”

“Yeah, you really are, you know that?” Xander snapped. “So stop acting like a spoiled brat for two seconds and think about the people who are putting the safety of a whole town on the back burner to give you a normal life. He goes, Dawn. Your days of being vamp sat are officially over.”

Tears began to stream down Dawn’s face. “I hate you, do you know that? I hate all of you.” She got up off the couch and ran upstairs, the slam of her bedroom door following the pounding of her footsteps like the end of a well-timed refrain.

“Oh, that went great,” Xander muttered, running his fingers through his hair. “Thanks for the backup, An. Way to come through for me there.”

“Well, you were belligerent,” Anya said from the corner. “And you really didn’t let me get a word in edgewise. Besides, it isn’t like this is a good idea. Sunnydale’s a town without a Slayer. Now you’re banishing its best fighter, too?”

The Scoobies looked around nervously, simultaneously meeting and quickly avoiding each other’s eyes.

“I can’t help but thinking about this life Dawn has,” Willow said. “Sister of the Slayer, living on a hellmouth, not even growing up as a Key, nearly being bled to death, surrounded by a Watcher, wiccas, and demons – she’s already making big with the weird factor. Buffy didn’t even get to choose this life.”

“And now that Giles has moved away, with both Buffy and Joyce gone…” Tara sighed.

“The last thing she needs is a vampire best friend to round out the funkadelic mix of nutty,” Xander finished, looking at Anya. “Cutting Spike loose just happens to be a perky benefit.”

“Even though he has saved your ass more times than you can count,” Anya muttered. “There’s gratitude for you.”

Willow, Tara, and Xander glowered in Anya’s direction. “What?” she asked defensively. “Someone’s got to be the voice of dissent.”

“It’s done,” Willow said. “Angel already agreed to take him in.”

“Angel?” Anya looked dubious. “Last I knew he had humans living with him. How are they going to feel about your vampire salvage mission getting dumped on their doorstep?”

Willow swallowed nervously and smiled. “I’m sure it’s gonna be fine.”

***

“Oh, this is so far away from ‘fine,’” Cordelia ranted. “Tell me you’re mixing up some whiskey in that blood or you took a bad roundhouse kick to the head. ‘Cause those are the only ways I can think of that you’d let that murderous thing into your home with, hi? The people you supposedly care about?”

Angel suppressed a sigh. “Cordelia, I’ve told you. He’s safe. The government put some high tech computer chip in his head so that he can’t hurt humans. He’s a demon killer only. We’re getting a good fighter here. Think about that.”

“Sorry, the little rebar scar with the matching entry and exit wounds gets twitchy whenever the name ‘Spike’ is mentioned around me.” Cordy sulked, then pointed to her belly. “See? There it goes right now.”

“Buffy’s friends don’t want him around Dawn anymore. He’s gotten close to her. Maybe a little too close. Dawn’s not a Slayer, she shouldn’t have to live this way now that her sister is…”

“Dead?” Gunn filled in, looking at Angel with growing resentment. “See, I’m thinking I better get used to saying it since that’s what we’re all gonna be with some soulless vamp bunking down the hall.”

“Angel, I have to agree,” Wesley said. “We know nothing about this chip, its makeup, its structure, how long it might take for it to disintegrate in Spike’s brain. I think you’re putting us all at incredible risk.”

Angel rolled his eyes and paced the floor of the hotel lobby. “What part of ‘safe’ don’t you understand? It is physically impossible for Spike to harm any human being. Do you think Buffy of all people would have fought next to him if he were that much of a threat? Put her own sister in that kind of danger?”

“Hey.” Cordelia put her hand on Angel’s shoulder. “I didn’t think that Spike was exactly your wingman here. What gives?”

He stood still for a moment, collecting his thoughts. “What gives is that after what happened to Buffy…” He swallowed hard. “If we lost Dawn, I’d never forgive myself. I’ve got to put my feelings about Spike aside.” He looked at Cordy. “Which, for the record? Aren’t positive by any means. But there’s no telling what Spike could do on his own. I have to operate under the ‘keep your enemies closer’ school of thought here.”

“This was a great fireside chat and all,” Gunn said grimly. “But what about Fred, fresh back from her hell dimension? How do you think she’s gonna take this news?”

Angel glanced upwards toward Fred’s room. “I’m sure it’s gonna be fine.”

***

“This chip you’re talkin’ about, does it operate in the prefrontal cortex? Or is it more closely located in the thalamus, somatosensory cortex, or other parts of the cerebral cortex? It doesn’t have to be exact, you know, just a ballpark guess.”

“Uh,” Angel hedged, watching her as they sat on her bed together. In order to process this new information, she needed to take refuge in the academic. The same habit probably saved her in Pylea, he got that. But he had no real answers for her. Finally, he held up his hands in defeat. “Fred, I have no clue.”

“Well, that’s disappointing.” She frowned. “I don’t see how I’m supposed to make an informed decision without all the facts.” She nervously tucked her hair behind her ears and glanced anxiously at her scribbled walls.

“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Angel said gently. “But I’m hoping you can trust me on this. Spike will not hurt you. You have my word, he’s dust if he even tries.”

Fred blinked and looked back at him. “You’d do that for me?”

He let a relieved smile break through. “Of course I would, but that’s not the point. I’m hoping that Spike will be a…well, a friend would be stretching it, but he’s strong and I think he might be persuaded to help us. That would include you.”

“Help.” Fred’s brow furrowed as she considered the word. “You mean with the laundry?”

“Sure.” He felt his smile begin to slip. “Even vampires have to do laundry occasionally.”

She didn’t want to remember what he could be capable of. Well, that made two of them.

He hesitated, eyes drifting over to her again. “Fred, if you agree to this, there’s no obligation on your part to do anything for him, not even to speak to him if you don’t want to. Spike doesn’t have a soul. He’s not like me.”

Her eyes widened. “Not like you.” She took the words in like a vow, nodding vigorously. “All right, okay, I think I see what you’re gettin' at.”

He didn’t think that she did, or saw that he had three girls to protect now - minus only the one he missed the most.

“What do you say, Fred?” he asked. He’d let her make the call on this, whether she’d trust him to keep her safe – keep both her and Dawn and Cordy safe – with his decision to bring a monster home to roost. _Another monster_ , his demon chuckled in his head, but he dismissed it. Fred didn’t believe that about him.

While she thought, her eyes roved all over his face like a caress. “It’s fine,” she said at last. “That Spike can come here if he’s got a mind to.”

***

“I’m out of my mind that I even agreed to this,” Spike muttered, the smoke he inhaled streaming out of his nose like dragon-breath. “What the hell are you doing to me, Nibblet?”

“I need you close,” Dawn admitted. “I can take the bus to L.A. and see you sometimes. Maybe. My dad still has a house there. I could take off for a day or two.”

“Don’t you dare,” Spike warned. “They’ll ban me from you for good if they catch you.”

“I won’t get caught. Besides, nobody’s making any moves until the little baby girl is done with high school,” she said mockingly. “No more trauma for a couple of years.”

“That would be a nice change, wouldn’t it?”

Dawn crossed Spike’s crypt and put her hand tentatively on his arm. “You took great care of me, Spike. The best.”

He reached out and mimicked her sister’s old gesture of smoothing her hair back. “Not good enough, as it turns out.”

“Maybe they’ll see how good you’re doing at Angel’s and want you to come back here anyway,” she said hopefully.

“Yeah, a reform school for vampires with Angel as the bloody headmaster. Can’t wait for that.”

“Spike.” She squeezed his arm. “Don’t do anything dumb, okay? For me?”

“Yeah, all right,” he said, tossing his cigarette to the ground. “Can’t think of a better reason anyhow.”

***

Fred crouched in the hallway, her eyes poised on the empty lobby below. In the wait of her vigil, she kept her knees drawn up to her chin and her face between the spindles of the balustrade – until the obstruction reminded her ever so much of bars on a cell and the realization jolted her to standing.

She wandered downstairs to Cordelia, who’d begun shutting down her computer and gathering her things.

“Last call for doughnuts and I mean really last call,” she sniffed in the box and then held it out. “All yours.”

“Oh, yes, please,” Fred replied eagerly and plucked the last stiff cruller out of the box. While she nibbled, she glanced around the room.

“They ain’t come yet, have they? I had to pee once, even though I tried my hardest to hold it.”

Cordy glanced at her. “There’s so much wrong with that sentence I don’t even know where to start.”

“B-but I ain’t missed ‘em?” Fred prompted her again.

Cordelia smiled. “No, the red carpet is safely unrolled. Don’t you know, Fred, that a watched vampire never shows up? Angel will be back when he gets back.” She picked up her purse. “In the meantime, our good friend Gunn will keep you company, when his eyes aren’t glued to that basketball game in there.” She nodded toward Angel’s office where the drone of dribbling echoed from the television.

“Gunn?” Fred frowned. “Cordy, ain’t you stayin’?”

“You mean be the welcome wagon for William the Bloody? No, kinda thought I’d pass on that, thanks.” She jingled her keys for effect.

“William the huh?” Fred asked and wrinkled her nose. “I thought Angel said his name was Spike.”

“Yeah, same guy. Ask Wesley for the history of the bloodsucking psychopath who’s our new houseguest. Wes hasn’t played PBS documentary boy in a while and God knows he needs a new audience. Plus, demons – his favorite subject.” She gave Fred an apologetic smile. “Sorry, but Spike’s not one of mine.”

Fred swallowed and looked down. “Spike’s an actual subject, you mean?”

Cordy sighed and got up from her seat. She leaned one hand on the desk and fixed Fred with her well-meaning, motherly stare. “Sweetie, I know that everybody you’ve met so far has been nothing but peaches and cream. But don’t expect that from Spike -- at all. I don’t want to scare you with the details, but he’s a ruthless, evil, vindictive killer. I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it and so do many of the friendly Sunnydale folks who managed to escape from him.”

“But people can change…” Fred started weakly.

“People maybe. Not animals.”

“I don’t know,” Fred said, studying her half-eaten pastry. “My daddy had this dog when he was little. His mean uncle used to put out cigarettes on the puppy’s nose and the poor thing took to biting everybody, that’s up until my daddy got hold of him and got him to be nice. Just by lovin’ him. And by not burning his nose, of course.”

“Fred,” Cordy said patiently, fingers tapping on the desk. “This isn’t a puppy. Bigger first of all, with much sharper teeth.”

“Spike can’t hurt people!” Fred cried in sudden fear. “Angel said so!”

“That doesn’t mean he won’t want to. He’ll want to kill more than he wants anything. More than he wants to be a good dog. Do you get that?” She waited until Fred nodded reluctantly. “You can fight it all you want, but you can’t beat instinct, Fred.”

Fred thought of the feelings roiling around inside of her, conflicted and contradictory and desperate to pull apart all the pieces of the puzzle that had yet to cross her doorstep.

“You’re right,” she agreed, the sugar of the cruller dissolving into bitterness on the back of her tongue. “Instinct never goes away. No matter how hard you try to beat it out.”

***

Sometime around midnight, the front door to the Hyperion squeaked open and Fred’s eyes snapped awake in the darkness of her bedroom at the sound.

_Daddy’s home._

She tiptoed out into the hallway, the whole of the lobby filled with a sort of amber, ethereal glow. Low voices from the office, quiet murmurs of introduction and then Gunn’s back retreating out the door, leaving two men watching each other warily, a study in contrasts: one tall, burly, and familiar; the other smaller, blond, pale, and so menacingly strange that she could barely look at him.

“Won’t be afraid,” she whispered to herself. “He’s here ‘cause I said so. I said he could.” Her chest swelled a little to think that her words could accomplish anything besides pull her into an unfathomable hell.

“Oh, no, Lord, no,” she murmured, squeezing her eyes shut at the memory of reading from a book that sucked her through the portal to Pylea.Spike couldn’t be bad as all that.

Could he?

_Spike will not hurt you...he’s dust if he even tries._

With Angel’s promise to guide her, she breathed out and forced her eyes back open to face what she’d wrought: the arrival of this new stranger.This killer.

Yet when she saw how Spike’s eyes darted around his surroundings so suspiciously, as cautious in his movements as she felt about hers, she realized that she couldn’t really see him that way, either. Just like she never saw Groo as the revulsion that the Pyleans painted him to be, or Angel as the monstrosity he’d seen in his reflection. With Spike swathed all in black, his nautical rucksack thrown over his shoulder, she immediately rewrote him as a wayward pirate forced to dock in some unsavory port and under, obviously, the strong arm of the worst kind of law.

Angel explained – no, that wasn’t the right word -- Angel _insisted_ which room would be Spike’s – no, not there, _get back here_ , this one here at the end of the hall where it was darkest.He had no business going anywhere else unless he got called to be there. From the safety of her doorway, Fred cringed at the sound of Angel’s voice, flat and disgusted, so unlike her gallant tour guide when she first arrived at the Hyperion. She smiled faintly, remembering how he drew her bath and replaced her Pylean slave clothes with some of Cordy’s cast-offs. No one, she thought as her smile faded, would be shaking out bath salts for Spike.

Her hand snaked into her pocket nervously, feeling for the creases of the letter she folded there, fingers darting over the four corners like crossing herself. If it weren’t for this letter – paired with the damnable curiosity that never got bled out of her – she would probably let Spike retreat into his darkness and she into hers. She’d heed the “do not enter” sign that the spectacle of his slouching and sulking unfurled before him like a banner. Instead, the letter had already teased her mind into considering another role for him before she ever saw him. From pirate, to grifter, to outlaw, he flitted through various scenarios in her mind, the Pylean and Texan mingling in her rattled brain and translating only one word, “hero.” The good scientist in her wanted to put him to the litmus test and see if her theory held.

Her ear drifted back to Angel’s explanation, how people lived here, well, one person actually, besides himself, how her name was Fred and how she’d been through a lot. Perhaps it was best if Spike avoided her, not ignored her necessarily – _look, just leave her alone. You got into enough trouble hanging around Dawn and Fred has nothing that you want_ ... oh, he got that part wrong.

Everybody needed a little physics in their lives, a little force of gravity. Someone to hold on to, keep you from falling off, a way to let you know that you held some bearing in the universe. How else could you measure the weight of your world unless you had someone to move in it?

Fred realized that she wasn’t the only one who had stopped listening to Angel. Spike’s eyes threaded up the hallway and to the open doorway from which she peeked. Slowly his expression adjusted in the dim light and his head dropped to one side, by just a degree of movement. Then his gaze rolled on to hers with a gradual interest and focus: _Hello, what’s this?_

With a stifled gulp, she clicked the door shut and leaned back against it, still feeling the force of his stare burn on her patch of the hall. Too late to shut him out, she could already feel his pull on her. One of her scrawled formulas on the wall caught her eye. Of course. Not merely the attraction of foreign bodies worked on her here, but Spike had actually pulled her out of her inertia with that look of his.

_A body in motion will stay in motion_ , she whispered like a prayer. The laws demanded it.

~*~

She inched out quietly later that night, drawn down to his door in hopes of initiating some kind of contact. Not an introduction, nothing that formal. Angel had already done that for them, shook their hands doorknob to doorjamb. Neighbors united in their seclusion by a common space. In her neighborhood back in Texas with homes separated by fields and farms, her mother would bake cookies or send a casserole. Spike, Fred reflected with a shiver, probably didn’t eat either. For him, she’d be snack enough.

For this trip, she left the letter secreted in what passed for her underwear drawer and immediately felt unprotected without it, like a voodoo priestess missing her talisman. Hiding it had become a ritual for her and she knew it couldn’t be trusted in the light – like so many things here. Although when she heard the wood of the drawer scrape shut she also felt instantly foolish to think that anyone would snoop. For whatever his crimes, this new visitor couldn’t come in without an invite and she found something altogether peaceful and civilized about that. On bare feet, she crept down the carpet and listened for the sounds of his unlife within. His floorboards creaked, then the bedsprings. A television hummed inside and he finally did, too – his voice as sad and moorless as the mariner she first imagined him to be.


	2. Chapter 2

Fred awakened the next morning, momentarily confused, which soon translated to the brief panic attack that accompanied many mornings.

_Where am I, where am I, where…_

Oh, right. Back in California. The Hyperion. Angel.

And now Spike.

Slowly, she sat up in bed, surprised by how rested she felt. She’d had a good night’s sleep, regardless of what lay in wait down the hall. No nightmares, although her head fairly buzzed with dreams that hadn’t pricked the barrier of her consciousness. Sleep so active, perhaps to make up for all she didn’t do in her waking hours.

When she ventured out of her room, she couldn’t help glancing at the closed door that held Spike behind it. His area of her hallway fairly hummed with significance and she wondered what he might be doing behind his door. Sure, vampires had nothing to get up for in the morning, no day to greet. The fact that Angel did it as a normal person with normal habits always struck her as odd, as though he were trying to pretend himself into being something different. Why pretend? Fred shrugged, mulling it over, and then she caught herself. She hadn’t stopped pretending since she’d arrived back in L.A.

The smell of coffee lured her down the stairs and toward the office.

“Fresh doughnuts,” Cordy called from her perch at the computer. “Get ‘em while they’re sticky.”

Fred peered into the box on the hotel’s front desk and wandered away from it restlessly. “Anybody up yet?”

“I’m thinking by 'anybody' you mean a 'somebody' who hasn't checked in.” Cordelia glanced up from her typing. “Don’t suppose there’s anything I can offer until Angel-anybody stumbles out?”

Fred’s cheeks flushed. “I-I just wanted to know how it went last night. The trip. Picking up…”

“The mother of all booby prizes?” Cordelia interrupted. “Yeah, according to Willow, he’ll sleep 'til like, dusk. That’s Spike, the chipped wonder. Big mooch and total slacker.”

“He’s depressed,” Fred whispered, fingering the letter in her pocket. “You sleep a lot when you’re depressed.”

Cordy pulled out the contract she’d been typing with a rip and flourish. “Yeah. That not being able to kill people sure is a bummer.” She turned around in her chair to face Fred. “Hey, my old skirt looks great on you. A little baggy on the backside, but that’s a quick fix. Fill it in with more doughnuts.”

“I’m not hungry,” Fred mumbled and pulled a random book from the desk before wandering out of the hotel to the courtyard.

~*~

She sat on the edge of the green-tiled fountain, feeling irrationally angry and breathless – angry with Cordy for the conversation they’d just had, angry at Angel for being asleep; even angry at the fountain for being old and broken. As she sat, the folded letter in her pocket jutted into her thigh and she quickly opened the book on her lap, trying to read.

Yet after a few lines, she realized with a sinking feeling that she’d grabbed one of Wesley’s tomes, some biblical treatise on the history of the written word. She should have found better subject matter if she wanted to distract herself from what she really wanted to read. The thing she’d already read and memorized countless times; the words that made everything different and made so much more sense now that she’d seen their subject in person.

_Hi, my name is…_

Fred cleared her throat, the sound echoing against the walls of the building and flipped another page, although she hadn’t read the one before it. Wesley would be coming to work soon. Wesley would come and she would be there to greet him and he would think how nice of her, maybe ask her how she was doing and that would lead so well to asking him all of her questions. Most of her questions anyway and to more important ones than the letter she held posed. Finally, she could throw that blasted letter away.

_HI. My name is Dawn Summers and I hope you will read this letter…_

Fred carelessly tossed the book into the well of the dry fountain. Who was she kidding? She’d never get rid of that letter. It made a promise to her, one that she couldn’t resist waiting to see if it would be fulfilled and how. Throwing her head back into the sun, she closed her eyes and allowed the words to have their way with her.

_…this letter about my friend Spike, who’s coming to live with you. I know you’re probably not looking forward to having a vampire come and live with you, especially when he doesn’t even have a soul. The thing I want to tell you is, I think he does have a soul in his own way and if you just read some of the things that he’s done, I hope that you might not think the worst of him, because he means so much to me. I hate to think that he’s going someplace where people don’t care about him, even though that’s pretty much where he’s been already, except for me. So keep him safe for me, would you? Please keep reading this and I will tell you everything about the Spike that I know…_

_Please…_

A shadow fell in front of her face, blocking the sun. “This is certainly a lovely way to start the day,” Wesley’s voice said above her.

Fred’s eyes flew open and she righted her head to meet him. “Oh!Hello there!”

He pointed towards the door. “Anything going on today?”

“Not that I can tell,” she answered, chewing briefly on her bottom lip as if in thought. “That Spike fella came last night.”

“Did he,” Wes said, his voice dipping down along with the corners of his mouth. “Have you seen Angel?”

“Not today,” Fred said, disappointed that her conversation didn’t seem to be going as planned. “Wh-why, you got somethin’ to tell him? Some research to do? Maybe on vampires?”

Wes took a step back and looked at her curiously. “Everything all right, Fred?”

She nodded while averting her eyes. “Sure.”

“Of course, I should have known.” Wesley took a seat next to her. “It’s Spike, isn’t it? You’re frightened living here with him. We can talk to Angel together, perhaps Cordelia can find space for you in her apartment…”

“No!” she said quickly. “I mean, it isn’t so much being afraid of him, I just don’t know anything about him. Cordy said that you might.”

He smiled tightly. “Fred, I’m afraid any of the data I have on Spike will do nothing to make you feel more secure. If anything, the stories I have are bound to give you horrible nightmares.”

“Oh.” Her hands twisted in her lap, useless and fidgety.

“I used to be a Watcher, Fred. We told you that when you arrived, yes? How a Watcher is sort of a guardian of a Slayer, like Angel’s friend, Buffy, was?”

“Girlfriend,” Fred corrected. “She was his girlfriend.”

“Yes, well. All the information I have on Spike is about his exploits as a vampire, a killer of not one, but two Slayers.” He leaned forward, meeting her eyes from under his glasses. “I’m no longer a Watcher, but I still have my copies of the lore.There are no happy endings in the Watcher Diaries, Fred. Especially not in the entries that feature Spike.”

_…if you just read some of the things that he’s done, I hope that you might not think the worst of him…_

Try as she might, Fred couldn’t stop the gravity of Wesley’s words from taking root, shutting out the handwritten pleas of Dawn Summers, who now seemed to Fred a sadly insecure and naïve young girl. Dawn couldn’t have known all the terrible things that Spike had done.

“He killed two Slayers,” Fred repeated, shaking her head. Then she stopped. “He didn’t kill Buffy, though.”

Wesley’s mouth dropped open and his eyebrows rose. “Well, no. That’s true. Although I understand that Spike had a rather unnatural fascination with Buffy. I’m sure he found her far more useful to fuel his twisted fantasies being alive than dead.”

Fred’s brow furrowed, suddenly latching on to a new train of thought and frantic to keep it with her. “Spike fought along side of Buffy and her friends.”

“For his own manipulative purposes, but yes.”

“Angel did, too. Right?”

“Yes, as a vampire with a soul he does see himself as a protector to fight for good over evil…”

“What about without a soul?”

Wesley blanched. “You’ll never wish to see Angel without his soul, Fred. If it happens…” He stopped. “Never mind.” He patted her shoulder. “Remind me to show you how to work the crossbow when you have some free time. Should probably do that soon, at any rate.”

“I’d like to read what you have on Spike,” Fred blurted. “I’ll be real careful with the pages, I won’t fold ‘em back or anything. I’m real good with books.” Quickly, she reached into the fountain and picked up the book she had thrown in. “I have no idea how that got there.”

“Fred –”

“Please, Wesley. I’ll practice with all the weapons you want me to, but when it comes down to it, the best one I have is right here between my ears. Learnin’s what I do. Besides, Spike can’t hurt anybody with that thing in his head.”

“That seems to be the general consensus.” Wes sighed. “You’d be a most trustworthy caretaker of any of my books, Fred, with your academic background. Might I interest you in a different subject, though?”

She shook her head stubbornly.

Wesley nodded, turning his palms up in surrender. “As you wish. I’ll put the volumes on my desk for you to peruse at your leisure. Although I recommend them for daytime reading only, since the descriptions have a tendency to be quite…graphic.”

“Thank you,” Fred smiled gratefully, and she watched him rise from his seat to walk into the hotel, wistful for this figure of a man who had no idea how soulless vampires could be the least of a girl’s nightmares.

~*~

The diaries proved to be every bit as horrific as Wesley had suggested, although not half as dry as Cordy warned her they would be. Fred found that she loved reading them for being part historical reference, part scientific analysis and all raw emotion – from the points of view of men who had watched idly by while their charges dove headfirst into battles they were destined to lose. Fred noted how every Slayer/Watcher relationship became its own unique, organic being, from the Watcher who protected his Slayer with all the passion of a lover, to the Watcher who killed his Slayer rather than watch the cancer ravage her young body. Even the Watchers who treated their Slayers as nothing more than particularly rare and valuable artifacts still imparted a sense of shock that the girls died against their foes when they did and gave the reader a profound awareness of their own inevitable failure.

No vampire, Fred realized, would be written as any less than the ultimate villain in these volumes. The only recourse the Watchers had against their guilt and pain of loss would be to historicize the vamps as the most diabolical of killers – which, Fred knew, indeed they were. Yet she couldn’t get past the vindictiveness of the entries, as if through words the Watchers were wrapping the dead hands of their Chosen Ones around stakes for one final slay.

Fred leaned back in the stiff office chair and considered the volumes before her. Without argument, one of the most deadly and persistent characters in these accounts had to be Angelus, the vampire with the face of an angel who made the destruction of a human being into some kind of art. She flushed self-consciously, the words on the page making her feel as though she saw him stripped bare.

_Never got to really see him, only felt him… moving and sweating under me, then on top, and oh, God, then deep inside, all of him, the man and the monster both…_

With a shudder, she pulled out of her thoughts and back to the focus the book provided.

Eventually, the pages led her to Angelus’ protégé, William the Bloody. Impulsive and calculating, he seemed to throw himself into every fray with a fury of impetuous glee, telling one of the Slayers he’d only come to “dance” on their particular night together; taunting another that she didn’t fight well enough for him to waste his time.He’d be so exciting, Fred thought, if he weren’t absolutely fatal.

Looking surreptitiously over her shoulder, she pulled out the creased letter from her pocket and smoothed it over one of the dusty texts.

_I guess you could say he pretty much fell in love with my sister. I know that doesn’t sound like a very good reason to stop being evil, but that’s how it started. He had a chance to let his old vamp girlfriend have a shot at killing Buffy and okay, he almost screwed that one up, but he didn’t in the end. Then we had Big Bad Glory last year, who turned out to be this hell god in the body of an infomercial hostess. She wanted to split open dimensions and rule the universe or something. Spike nearly let himself get beaten to death rather than tell Glory who the Key was that she wanted so badly – I can tell you that the Key happened to be me. Even after all that, after Buffy died and I stopped being a Key and went back to being a regular girl, Spike still protected me. Buffy wasn’t even around but Spike wouldn’t leave my side for anything. Until some people forced him to go, which I’m not too happy with them about that._

Heaving a massive sigh, Fred noticed how the handwritten letter fell against the open page of one of the diaries showing a curly-headed vampire in vignette, brandishing a bloody railroad spike and wearing an impish, lascivious grin. There was no way to reconcile the two halves before her, of one belonging any more to the man than the other. To accept the one side, you logically had to take its opposite into consideration. Nature worked that way and it was one of the things she loved about science: its utter constancy even amid seeming chaos.

“Doing all right?” Wesley asked behind her. Fred grabbed the letter and folded it back into her pocket before he could see it.

“Fine, thanks,” she turned around and smiled. “The diaries are fascinating.”

“Aren’t they,” Wes agreed eagerly, pulling up a chair next to her. “It’s the rare intelligence that can appreciate the value of such records.”

“’Rare intelligence’ or complete freakazoid,” Cordy called out from her desk. “No offense, Fred.”

“None taken,” she answered and returned her attention back to Wesley. “You were Buffy’s Watcher once, right?”

“All too briefly, I’m afraid.” He looked down sheepishly. “What you’re reading are only condensed copies of the originals, Fred, and you won’t find any entries of mine. They’re in the custody of Buffy’s true Watcher, Rupert Giles. Buffy’s death hit him particularly hard. He hasn’t even composed his own accounts yet.”

Fred nodded, hoping she hid her disappointment. She would’ve given anything to know how one of Buffy’s Watchers would explain Spike’s most recent behavior, if it would be touched on at all or would simply be logged as a trivial footnote in the Slayer annals.

“I suppose you have an even better understanding of why Cordelia and I were particularly displeased with Angel bringing Spike here in the first place,” Wes continued. “A killer with such a gruesome history.”

“Like Angel.”

While Wesley struggled to respond, Fred pressed further. “One of the names I saw even more than William the Bloody was Angelus. That’s Angel, isn’t it? The four of them, cutting a swath of death through Europe. They’re famous. They’re like the demon version of Abba.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you heard Angel sing,” Cordy cut in.

“Fred, I believe that Angel brought Spike here not from any misplaced guilt on his part, but because of Buffy’s sister, to free her of her attachment to Spike.”

The picture of Spike seemed to wink at her from the page. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” she said softly.

Wesley went on, oblivious to her comment. “Angel has a soul, Fred. Spike does not. I’ll trust you to remember that important difference. The only thing barring him from committing the same acts you read about is the device wired in his brain.”

“I know. Negative reinforcement. It’s not the most successful of all the therapies out there, but it could prove useful for ADD cases like Spike. Angel’s OCD, so he would be less responsive...” She trailed off when she saw the distressed look on Wesley’s face.

Cordy broke the uncomfortable silence. “Now there’s something you don’t hear everyday, vampire psychoanalysis. If you’d hung your shingle out in Sunnydale, you could’ve made a fortune, Fred.”

“Spike’s not here for us to reform,” Wes said coldly. “His history speaks well for the fact that he’s incapable of it.”

“He must be here for something,” Fred began.

“I assure you, that kind of magical thinking will lead you nowhere...”

“It’s not magic! It’s physics!”

“Guys,” Angel spoke. Fred and Wes looked over at the front desk, where Angel had suddenly appeared.

“Angel!” Fred blurted breathlessly, her face breaking into joy. “See, now, you’re a great believer in physics, Angel, I know you are, so maybe you can settle this eensy little point I’m trying to make with Wesley here…” She felt her cheeks grow hot.

Angel, on the other hand, ducked his head and averted his eyes when she spoke, which caused Fred’s smile to collapse.

_It doesn’t mean nothin’_ , she tried to console herself. _It’s only ‘cause he’s in front of everybody and has to act like the boss right now._

“Fred,” Angel said, his face set in a grim line. “I know what this is about. I heard it all.” He looked at Wes and Cordelia in turn.

“Look, I brought Spike here for Dawn’s sake, sure. From what Willow told me, I thought he could be good for muscle, too. Tomorrow night, I’ll put him to the test. He doesn’t give us back up, I’ll set him loose.” He shook his head. “I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to Dawn, but Spike isn’t worth dividing my friends over.”

Wesley stood up and the two men walked toward Angel’s office.

“Angel!” Fred called.

He turned around slowly, finally, achingly meeting her eyes for one brief instant.

“Yeah, Fred?”

“Everybody deserves a chance,” she said haltingly. “Y-you know?”

He smiled again, this time one more genuine and nodded before retreating into the office and shutting the door quietly.

“Of all the things for you to get chatty about.” Cordy sighed. “It had to be Spike, huh?”

Fred sat still for a few more minutes. Then feeling wholly foreign to her surroundings, she abandoned the books for the safety of her silent room.


	3. Chapter 3

Night again. He could feel it. Thank Christ for it, since he had no real vista to enjoy, only the filthy awning window rusted a quarter-way open, a permanent vent for his near-constant cigarette smoke. A room with no view was the one consideration that had been expended to his stay. Sunlight wouldn’t kill him while he slept and that would be Angel’s only consent to Spike’s existence here.

Spike had felt nightfall twice and still hadn’t made his way out of his room, the television and booze and miniature refrigerator with its lone container of animal blood giving him no reason to leave. Perhaps that was the point – Angel didn’t want him to come out any sooner than he had to. Meantime, his lone neighbor got unlimited privileges to wander the hotel as she pleased. With a shift of floorboards from up the hall, he knew that she’d started prowling again.

He heard her rambling upstairs around midnight when he first arrived and even earlier this night. The predator in him ached to leap out of his chair and hunt her down – not to make her bleed, but at least get a good look at her, see more than the scrap of her skirt and the wisp of a braid before her door shut again. But he sat still, sipped his whiskey, and mulled over his current situation to the tune of footstep Fred. She stalking the halls, he stalking his own thoughts, but both of them set in wheels spun in place with nowhere else to go.

At least he’d given it a shot, fought the good fight in Sunny D until the petulant Scoobs forced Angel to take him in. Dawn would never have a normal life with him lurking about, so the argument went. Yet selfishly, they also wanted to keep him handy. He could hear Dru’s voice in his head, “Telling you you’re not a bad dog when you are,” for that’s ever so much what he felt like -- a feral guard dog that no one dared to put down but that no one wanted to keep, either, never mind cuddle with and scratch behind his ears. That had been Dawn’s job and for a while, it had been a fine place to be.

On the silent ride to LA, he figured that he’d just stay with Angel one night and then slip away, his thoughts not even registering or factoring in the most important part of the equation, the whole reason for his leaving in the first place. Now alone, the lack of Dawn’s presence smarted almost as much as the never-ending pang for her sister. Sure he could escape and struggle to live, a crippled vamp alone, no chance to see his Bit again, with Angel on his heels and hell-bent to dust him for escaping. It would be suicide, which even with his Slayer gone and the Niblet in tatters, he couldn’t quite face his ending just yet.

Could have been worse here, he reasoned. Two days gone and so far Angel and his band of humans kept their distance. Perhaps they saw him for the contract killer that he knew Angel meant for him to be. He’d get yanked out of solitary for his strength and be avoided the rest of the time. With no Buffy and no chance of the chip getting out of his head, he would have no better gig than this one, dancing the limbo and counting the days until he could see or speak to Dawn again.

The floorboards creaked outside his room.

He shifted into gameface without even meaning to, so strong his curiosity and the instinct that the girl was prey, no matter whether he could pursue it or not. All his senses sang that outside his door crept the object of what his nature meant to claim.

Opening his door soundlessly, he padded into the hallway and spied her at the end of it, reflected in shadow. Her head perked up, like a rabbit testing the air and she turned around.

He felt his face slide back to normal. “What is it?”

“Nothing, I’m…nothing. Go on back to bed.”

“Wasn’t in bed.” He walked toward her and she began walking too, reluctantly he could tell. They met halfway. “I know why I’m not. What’s your excuse?”

A wisp of a thing, this Fred, all delicate bones with long, flowing limbs like a dancer. He could feel the tautness of her muscles through her movements practiced and quick. Her adrenaline in the air smelled high and sweet, and if he sprung on her he bet she could give him a delicious fight.

“I just like walking at night, that’s all. Everyone’s asleep, it’s quiet, and I like it this way. You can hear me?”

“Walls are thin, love.”

“Oh.” Her feet started moving in place, revving her up without taking her anywhere. “Oh, I’m sorry. I guess I won’t...I’ll find someplace else to do it.”

“Don’t you dare. I don’t mean to hear you. I can’t help myself, is all.”

“Right.” She took one step back. “Vampire.”

“I won’t hurt you, love. I can’t. Bloody government chip in my head makes it so I can’t bash anything except demons.”

She stepped forward. “So you don’t hurt humans at all?” Stepped again. “Ever?”

“I slip up once in awhile. You know, sock one in the jaw by accident.”

“What’s it feel like?”

Spike thought of the last solid jolt he got from the chip: Harris. When the Scoobs came to shake him out of his crypt, he took a good lunge at them and had the satisfaction of hearing the ponce shriek like a little girl. Worth every second of the pain afterwards, that was.

“Ever get a bit of electrical shock? Bad lamp wiring or some such?”

One of Fred’s hands darted up to her throat and gave the skin there a nervous scratch. “Once.”

“Imagine about one hundred times the voltage, honed in right behind your eyes.”

“Ow!” Fred touched her forehead in sympathy.

“That’s usually what I say, yeah.”

She chanced another step until they stood within arm’s length of each other, close enough for him to see that her eyes were indeed brown, warm cups of tea with a hint of milk and an intensity that he couldn’t name.

“So you’re safe, to be around, I mean.”

He choked out a laugh. “No need on insulting me, pet. We barely know each other.”

She bent toward him as though looking for a secret. “You want to be dangerous?”

“Damn right!” he retorted with such intensity it surprised him and it should’ve surprised Fred, but she still leaned in wait for him.

“It’s what I am, it’s what I do. Well. What I did.” He leaned back against the hallway wall, folding his arms across his chest. “See, I want it, but I know I can’t have it. It’s been so long sometimes…I’m not even sure if I could do it again like I did. If it would be the same.”

“You just don’t want there to be any consequences,” she said mildly, drawing back, the mystery apparently solved for her. “You want it all.”

He grinned.“Only the things I want.” Fred only fixed him with that virtuous, inscrutable smile.“Something wrong with that?” he barked and felt the pleasure of seeing her finally start at him.

“I-I guess not. Lots of humans are like that and they don’t see anything wrong with it.”

“But you do.”

“There’s always consequences. You getting that chip was a consequence of you being a killer. Me getting sucked into Pylea was…” She trailed off. With a furtive glance, she met his eyes again. “Do you like it here?”

“Not so bad as prisons go. Why?”

“You don’t have to stay, you know.”

"Yeah, you're right on that.” He considered his condition. "I'm my own man, can come and go as I please. Sod Angel and his house rules..."

"No, I mean here. Here at all."

The conspiratorial tone of her voice intrigued him. "You offering to spring me from Alcatraz, little bird?"

"If, if you don't help us...Angel will let you go. He'll want you to go and he won't come after you."

Spike rolled the thought around like a bitter pill on his tongue. So that’s how it was. He’d tried telling Dawn how much her request asked of him; much more than he felt he’d been capable of, promises to Buffy aside. How living under Angel’s fist would be like this: Daddy’s way or the expressway. Now it looked like Angel had already decided to send him packing before Spike had barely gotten unpacked. Hell, that alone would be good enough reason to stick around on purpose just to torment the bastard.

"Testing me, eh? See if the dog will hunt? No free lunch for Spike, gotta make him take his punches, put him through all his paces or have him die trying." He shook his head in disgust. "Don’t let him fool you, love. He wants me to quit so he'll have a fine excuse to dust me. Make no mistake." He paced a few more minutes. “Well, bugger that.”

"S-so,” Fred said, cutting to his chase. “That mean you’re stayin'?"

"Damn right I'm staying," Spike growled. "You tell his eminence he can throw whatever he wants at me. I ain't budging."

"All right then, neighbor," she said, the cadence of her Southern drawl soft and somehow pleased. "You go on and get some rest." She ambled back up the hall towards the door he'd seen her peeking out of before and then quickly turned back, holding out her hand.

“Oh, by the way, I’m Winifred Burkle.Everybody calls me Fred.”

“Yeah, I figured,” he grinned at the obviousness of it, leaning out and squeezing her fingers in a brief note of introduction. “I’m Spike.”

“Well, of course you are!” she scoffed. “Who else would you be?”

Suddenly, it occurred to him that Angel would never send a girl like Fred after him, never mind give him a head start.

"Fred."

"Uh-huh?"

"Did I pass, pet?"

Perhaps he saw a trick of the light or the strands of hair falling in her face, but she seemed to wink at him before hurrying down to her room and closing the door.

***

When Spike’s call to arms finally arrived after sunset, it came in the form of Angel's fist hitting the center of his door once like the beat of a gong sounding.From his seat in front of the television, Spike couldn't tell whether it signaled the beginning or the end of his fight.He refrained from jumping up to answer it but instead lingered in his chair for several practiced seconds, enjoying Angel's growing irritation with a perverse pleasure.

"I know you're in there, Spike.I can hear the damn TV."

"Right," Spike called back."Can't put anything past you."

"Come on.Got Nester Demons to kill.Need an extra pair of hands."

Spike stubbed out his cigarette and grabbed his coat."So what, you think I'm some bloody exterminator?Get your little minions to torch ‘em."

"The Nesters have infested a home, Spike.The removal process has to be a bit more delicate than setting them on fire."

“You want me to carry the front line, is it?" He lifted a bottle to his lips and tipped the dregs of warm whiskey down his throat, feeling the pleasant burn as it went.He smacked his lips with resolve."I’ll make a nice buffer for you and your groupies."

"Cordy, Wes, and Gunn aren't expendable.You are."

Spike stabbed the power button on the television and yanked the door open to greet Angel's glower in the hallway.

”Door wasn't locked, mate.But don't get any ideas.You’re still not welcome."

"You're still not housetrained," Angel countered."You're the guest here, so watch it, or you might be the one to find yourself uninvited.Now let's go."

***

When they reached the lobby of the hotel, Spike saw the girl he recognized from the Sunnydale crew, with the Shakespearean name, one of Lear's girls, Cordelia - the "good" daughter.Trick bit of naming that was.

As she selected weapons out of a wardrobe-like cabinet, she then handed them to two men: one, a pale, bookish fellow with glasses and the other, a sturdy, dark-skinned athletic type.None of them looked up when Spike entered the room.

”Cordelia Chase, you might remember," Angel said by way of introduction."Gunn you met the other night and this is Wesley."

Wes adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose and stepped forward hesitantly."Wesley Wyndham-Pryce:former Watcher and rogue demon hunter."

"Watcher, eh?"Spike stood with his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels.“For anyone I know?"

"Erm, uh, well..." Wes stammered, avoiding the question."I understand that you’ve already met my associate," he said instead, slapping his hand on the other man's back."Charles Gunn."

To this man, Spike pulled out his hand and earned a scowl in return.

"Not shaking with you, man," Gunn said, glaring first at Spike's hand and then at Spike's face."I don't give over to some soulless vamp just 'cause he claims to be playing for my side."

"Don't want your hand," Spike answered lightly."Just the broadsword that's in it."

"Oh," Gunn looked down at the sword he held."Yeah, take it.I don't like this one anyway."He shoved the heavy metal into Spike's palm.

"All right," Angel said."That's everybody.Let's get to it."

Spike took his turn behind the others in grabbing the remaining weapons.He plucked a battle-axe from the pile and swung it over his shoulder, glancing upstairs before heading out the door.

"It isn't 'everybody,'" Spike muttered under his breath, but no one remained in the room to hear him.

***

"That," Wesley intoned."Would not be described as the epitome of a pleasant evening."Cordelia helped him through the door, while the rest of the crew stumbled in around them, exhausted and gooey.

"You think the Nesters would be taking piano requests?" Spike growled.

"I think we stopped the bleeding," Cordy said, peering at the torn gash in Wesley’s arm and reapplying pressure with a section of torn fabric."But this cut looks deep enough to go beyond my patching skills.Definitely stitch-worthy."

"Oh dear," Wes sighed, looking at his arm and tying the fabric around it."I'd hoped to avoid another emergency room visit.Although," he glanced in Spike's direction."I suppose it could've been worse."

"Yeah, he can be handy with the slice and dice in helpful ways that don't involve mass murder.Who knew?" Cordelia said, with a dismissive wave of her hand.“So Wes, you want a lift to the hospital?”

“No, I think I can maneuver on my own,” Wes held up his good arm in salute.“Night all.”

“All right then,” Spike said, wiping a hunk of demon guts from his forehead with a slimy hand.“Fun’s over.Pay up.”He wiped the hand on his jeans and calmly held it out to Angel.

“Huh?” Angel asked from his seat on the hotel’s worn circular sofa, as he cleaned the weapons with a towel damp and bloodied with viscera.“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Payment.For my services.Way I see it, you’d all be mashed up in tasty bite sizes if it weren’t for me.They all get paid.I should, too.”

Angel snorted and shook his head.“You get paid in a room free of sunlight and in the protection of people who won’t dust you.Clue in to the fact that it’s more than you deserve.”

“Look, you set up this little enterprise to be all above-board, by the books here.You say the word and I’ll find us a choice, rent-free catacomb with an ocean side view.Until then, you got me dependent on big mother dollar for three of the four things that make my pathetic existence bearable.”Spike thought about it for a moment.“Actually all four if you’re counting.”

Cordelia breezed past with a replenishment of cleaning supplies and a tense smirk.“I know we can’t wait to hear what you spend your hard earned cash on, Spike.”

He held up his hand and flicked off the digits.“Booze, blood, smokes and snatch.Not necessarily in that order.”Cordy grimaced.

“Yeah, that last one’s gotta be breaking your bank,” Gunn said, putting the weapons up into the cabinet.

“Spoken like a man who knows!When’s the last time you got a bird to spread for you that you hadn’t paid for?”

Gunn whipped around with a freshly cleaned scythe in his hand.“You keep those fangs flapping, bleach boy.Give me one more reason to hack off that empty head of yours.”

“Enough!” Angel yelled, standing up between them.“Spike, shut up.Gunn, put that weapon away.” He put his hands on his hips and paced for moment.“Spike’s got a point.”

“Ha!” Spike exclaimed with delight.

Cordelia stopped behind the front desk, her eyes wide.“He does?”

“Think about it.When’s the last time any of you got paid anything decent for what you’re doing?”

Spike indicated his empty palm. “Then give me my bloody money.”

“That’s just the thing.I can’t.Rent, taxes, electric bill, water bill, phone bill, and there never seems to be anything left over for anybody’s salary, not even mine.”

“You’re on a mission of atonement.That’s payment enough.As for the rest of us here…” Spike looked around.“Well, you all eat, don’t you?”

Cordy and Gunn exchanged guilty looks and glanced at Angel.

“This started off as a side hustle for me,” Gunn said.“But I wouldn’t look cross eyed at a little something extra for rolling home wearin’ entrails every night.”

“Same here,” Cordy chimed in.“I mean, I’ve been getting some better than B-grade commercial spots here lately.But Angel, the dry-cleaning bills for this gig alone…”

Angel sighed.“I know.”

“No one’s even thought to mention your cloistered nun upstairs or the poor ex-Watcher– Council can’t still be paying him after all these years,” Spike continued, amid the glares of Angel, Cordy and Gunn.“Face it.You’ve got a financial crisis on your hands.”

“Fred’s earning potential right now is a little…limited,” Angel said.“Any hell dimension will do that to a girl, but I think she’s getting better.Doesn’t cost much for her Tex-Mex takeout, that’s for sure.”

“Hell dimension?” Spike asked.

“Pylea,” Cordy offered.“Pretty much only hell to the humans who are slaves to the locals and pretty much torture if you’ve been there any longer than a week.”

“Just how long was young Fred there?”

“Five years to us,” Angel said.“But figuring in dimensional shifts, plus the whole time-space continuum…”

“Rounds out to something more like a lifetime,” Spike finished, shaking his head.He glanced upstairs to the closed door of Fred’s room.“Rotten lot, that is.”

“But not as rotten as yours without cash, right, Spike?” Angel retorted, pulling out his wallet.“Here’s twenty bucks to get you the hell away from me.Cordy, let’s go over the books and the bills, see where we stand.”

It took Spike several minutes of staring upward before he realized that he held a limp bill in his hand and that the rest of his company had departed.

***

“I’m sorry,” Fred piped up from her corner of the hallway, as he let himself into his room.

With his hand on the doorknob, he turned to look at her.“Sorry?”

Hesitantly, she padded closer to him.“When you said you thought of here bein’ like jail, well, that got me to thinkin’ about all the ways it didn’t have to be.Rescuin’s what Angel does best, to hear tell it.He rescued me.I kinda thought he might do the same for you, too.”

Spike shook his head.“He and I go way back, love.Far past any rescuing.”

“I’m sorry, about your prison.”

“Sorry about your hell dimension.”

“Yeah,” she said vaguely.“Guess there’s worse things than bein’ a nun.”

Spike’s mouth dropped open.“Fred, I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just trying to pluck at Angel’s heartstrings, free up a bit of capital for the proles here, you included.”

She waved his apology away.“It’s okay.Thing is, we’re never gonna make any kind of money if we keep on not gettin’ paid for what we do.”

“He’s doing this,” Spike began to fume.“As a bloody patronage?”

“No, no, not like how you’re thinkin’ on it.Sometimes we get paid.Other times…well, folks don’t really know how to take us, now do they?They just want their demon eggs gone or that pesky werewolf to stop howlin’.Once that happens, it’s like the supernatural thing that bugged ‘em never really existed and we’re out our fee.”Fred shook her head.“God, would you listen to me?Sayin’ ‘we’ like I ever do anything.”

Spike stepped towards her and smiled.“You’re about to, pet.I want the names and addresses of every welcher that’s passed through those doors.Their bills are about to come due.”

Fred looked at him with interest, the corners of her mouth twitching up.“What’re you gonna do?”

“You get that list for me, love.I’ll keep you in nachos and me in bourbon for the next year.”


	4. Chapter 4

Near dawn the next morning, Spike threw open the front doors of the hotel with a bang, still wired from his evening out. He hadn’t exactly slaughtered a populace but the activity had stirred him more than anything else had of late. As he breezed through, he tossed a thick envelope on to the front desk of the hotel. The sudden noise caused Cordy to jerk awake from her uncomfortable perch on one of the sagging sofas, the company’s accounting books at her feet.

“Jeez!” she gasped.“Loud much?”

“Good morning to you, too.”

“Oh,” she said.“It’s you.Couldn’t stay out just a few minutes longer, huh?You’re missing a killer sunrise.”

He nodded towards the envelope and headed straight for Angel’s mini-fridge stash of blood.“You’ll want to put that somewhere.”

Cordy leveled him with a defiant stare.“Don’t tempt me.”

“Suit yourself,” he grunted.He poured a mug full of O-negative, then changed his mind and grabbed the whole Mason jar, spinning the cap back on and tucking it under his arm before heading towards the stairs.

“Hey,” she called.“Angel’s gonna be plenty peeved when he finds out you swiped his breakfast.”

“Then show him the envelope, Princess.Likely to change his whole bloody appetite.”

~*~

Several hours later, an insistent pounding interrupted Spike’s sound, dreamless sleep of accomplishment.

“Keep your knickers on, I’m coming,” Spike opened his door to find Angel standing with the envelope in hand and an ominous expression on his face.“Oh.You.No need to thank me, all in a day’s work.”

“Thank you?I’m trying to figure out how to hold back from tearing you apart with my bare hands.Do you know what I’ve been doing all morning?Apologizing to my clients for the so-called ‘enforcer’ who shook them out of mass sums of money last night.”

“’Enforcer,’ eh?”Spike nodded approvingly.“Gotta say that has a nice ring to it.”

“Spike, you threatened our clientele, broke half a dozen laws, cut phone lines, put an entire security company out of business, and that’s just what I already know about.”

“I didn’t kill anybody!” he hollered.

“No, they all quit.Shooting at prowlers they’re used to.Shooting bullets at fang-faced extortionists who don’t die?Not exactly in a security guard’s job description.”

“Giving the money back are you?” Spike asked innocently.

Angel grit his teeth and glanced around furtively.“No one asked for any money back.”

“Aha!” Spike pointed at him triumphantly.“I knew it!”

“In all likelihood, they’ll also never do business with us again or recommend our services.”

“Yeah, well, more’s the pity, isn’t it?Like we need any more deadbeats.”

“All so you could get your damn allowance.”

“Did take a sizable cut off the top, thanks ever so.”

Angel reached over and dug his finger into Spike’s chest.“You stay out of my business and stay away from the people I’m trying to help.You want money, you find your own customers to shake down.I won’t deal with this again.”He gave Spike a final shove and headed down the hall.

Spike slammed the door.Miles away from the Scoobies and he could still feel just as useless.He paced for a few minutes looking around for something to break, when it occurred to him how much he actually needed everything in this room.

A tentative knock came at the door.No question the girl who made it.

“‘S open.”

The warm scent of Fred drifted into the room behind him.“Sorry to bother you.These walls are pretty thin.”

“That they are,” he smiled and turned around.“Come for your share, pet?”

She flushed.“N-no, that’s okay, I didn’t do anything.”

“The hell you didn’t,” he went over to his duster and pulled out a stack of bills.“Weren’t for you giving me that dunning list, I never could have made my calls.”He shook the money at her.“Take it, Fred.You’ll need it.Maybe not now, but when you do, you’ll thank your bloody stars you have it.”

Biting her lip the whole time, her hand stretched out slowly and then grabbed on to the wad of paper, shoving it into the back pocket of her jeans.She looked up at him and blinked ingenuously, as though they hadn’t exchanged a thing.

“Good girl,” he said with soft admiration.

“It isn’t why I came though,” she said and held out her other hand, which contained a small metal tray holding gauze, tape, a small flashlight and a pair of forceps.“Heard you got shot at.Any of ‘em take?”

Spike squinted at her, thinking that he must not have heard her correctly.“Uh, a couple, yeah.”

She nodded quickly and shook her bangs in front of her face, lowering her eyes.“I’ll see to ‘em if you want.All the critters I’ve come across and I’ve never done any kind of dissection on a vampire.”

He paused for only a moment, staring at her intently the whole time, and tugged off his black t-shirt, dropping it on the floor at her feet.“Wouldn’t think of keeping you from it.”

“Wh-where’d they get you?”

He sat on the edge of the bed.“Back of the right shoulder in the fleshy part of the arm.”He straightened his leg out and winced.“Another one in the side of my left thigh.”

She moved behind him and he felt the warmth of her breath and her hands explore his cool back.Fingers gentle, practiced, and sure pressed around the wound.

“Do they hurt?”

“They don’t tickle.”

She giggled softly.“Should I stitch you?”

“No need.Only get the metal out, if you can.”

“Oh, I can,” she answered confidently and he felt her apply the forceps teeth to the torn hole that the bullet had ripped through.Tensing his back, he readied himself for the twinge that would come, which always came in such delicate operations on raw flesh.Instead, he heard a metallic rattle in the tray and the soothing application of a bandage with tape.

“There’s one down,” Fred announced.

“You couldn’t have gotten it.”

But he peered into the tray and, sure enough, he saw the bloodied slug inside.

“Now for uh, the next one.Um,” she glanced down at his pants, focused on the burned circular hole in the denim way up by his hip.

He dug his finger in the hole and frowned.“Bugger.Not another pair gone.”

“You can afford as many as you want now.”

“Thanks to you.”

“So,” she shifted uncomfortably.“How do you wanna do this?”

“No need for you to travel south.I’ll pry my own pellet out.”

“No!”

He raised one eyebrow at her.“You that desperate to get my pants off me, love?”

She blushed so furiously it almost chastened him.“I can do it, I mean, I should do it.If that bullet hit bone, you’re gonna have more problems than torn jeans.”

He nodded thoughtfully, wondering at this girl who put another’s well being over her modesty.“You’re quite the science-type, aren’t you?”

“My daddy used to say no rock would be safe from me,” she said with a giggle.Her expression then turned earnest.“Meaning that I’d be looking under ‘em all, to see everything that’d be wigglin’ around...”

“I got it.”

“Well, here we go,” she said and backed up from him, her eyes pinned on the floor.“You can drop ‘em. I’ll even turn around if you –“

Before she stopped speaking, he’d risen to his feet, unfastening the notch of his worn leather belt and unzipping his fly with one hand.Slowly, he inched the denim past the bones of his hips, daring her to look at him. To finish, he let the metal of the belt buckle slip from his fingers and hit the floor with a clang. 

“I’d give you one better if I had the proper music,” he said dryly, stepping out of the pants.

“All right,” she breathed, all business-like.“Just sit back down and I’ll...oh!”Her hand flew up to her face.“You’re... oh.”Her eyes slammed downwards again.

“Never had that reaction before,” he pouted.“You’re likely to give a bloke a complex.Ah, but I see now.You weren’t expecting the natural look.”

"N-not really," she stammered. 

"Right.You can go.I'll save you the bother."

Her eyes darted around furiously, then settled on his face."No.Sit down.I said I’d do it."

Quietly, he obeyed and the girl knelt at his feet.Intent and professional in her examination, she inspected the entry of the wound with a critical eye.Under her gaze, he suddenly became all too aware of his nakedness before her, and his hands folded awkwardly in his lap.

Again, the gentle puff of her breath touched his skin like a curl of steam, causing a painful knot in his throat.All of her emotion and interest focused on him and the pistol shot in his leg.Wasn’t the same as being poked and prodded at the Initiative, all sterility and impassion there.A doc like Fred would have changed all that.

He wagered he would’ve had the same reaction he experienced at that moment:ribbons of tendons, lengthening, tightening, swelling and filling with blood, all on edge for the next gorgeous moment, aching for release under the hands of this girl…

So curious...

He could feel the hairs on his skin reaching out to her, the memory of his instinct seeking out its mate.He remembered this curiosity before Finn’s crew had twisted his nature into searing pain.How he would tip his face up into the night air and drink in the full breath of the chase crying out to him.How this cracked and patched girl, with her agonizingly cautious hands, asked the same from his skin.From him.Here, he meant something – even as the lone grub under the oft-peered stone of the Hyperion – he had her full attention.

Forceps in hand, she leaned against the muscle of his thigh and he could feel it tremor under the pressure.

“This one’s gonna be more tricky,” she said.“It went in at an angle.You gotta relax that muscle.”

“It’s relaxed.”

“Why no, it can’t be.The whole anterior side of your leg is…” she swallowed and moved away slightly.

“…hard as a rock,” she finished in a small voice.

He moved his hands so that they covered his crotch completely and tried a smile.“Blood flow’s a funny thing, love.”

“It’s a perfectly natural male reaction,” she nodded quickly.“I’m not embarrassed if you’re not embarrassed.”

“A bit too concerned about shrapnel to be embarrassed.”

“Right,” Fred said gamely and lifted the forceps back to his leg.“Here goes.”She leaned in again, holding up the small flashlight with her other hand.Several locks of her hair dangled in front of her face and she tried to blow them aside.

Looking up at him, she indicated her hands with a nod.“Could you…?”

Spike knew she meant for him to hold the flashlight so that she could pull her hair back and continue working, but he couldn’t make himself do it.Instead, he reached down and smoothed her hair back with his hand, collecting all the tendrils in her face and pulling them back around the elastic of her loose ponytail.

“How’s that?”

She stared at him for just a moment more, her eyes and lips open in calm surprise.

“Thank you.”

Then she returned her attention back to the wound, dug the forceps into the muscle with a quick jab that elicited a yelp from his throat, and yanked the plug out.

“Got it!”

“I bloody well hope so!” Spike winced and reared back, but still kept his one hand buried in the nest of her hair.

“It’s like rippin’ a Band-Aid off.You just gotta go in there and grab it, no pussy-footin’ around.”

“Yeah,” he grimaced through his pain, glancing at her with a grudging respect.“Glad you didn’t pussy foot.”

“Lemme get a bandage on this,” she said and reached around on the floor for the box of gauze and the tape. She moved under his hand so easily that he didn’t have to release her hair yet, which, he realized, was the last thing he wanted to do.

It dawned on him then that she could be, maybe, drawing it out.Taking her time with the tape, fumbling with it even, with the same hands that only minutes ago performed practically painless surgery on him.Anxiety rolled off of her in waves, but not like when he first met her.In her element here and returned to what she knew best had made her confident.That, mixed with the heady smell of her sweat and effort, did little to ease the taut muscles in his lower regions.

“All done,” she sighed.Reluctantly, he pulled his hand from her scalp, releasing her with a small pat.

“Thanks for patching me, pet.”

She collected her tools and rose to her feet.Her eyes took him in calmly, devoid of nervousness.It told him that she knew parts of him now, though he realized how much she remained still a mystery to him.

“I wouldn’t have had to do a thing, if you hadn’t gone off and done what you did,” she turned towards the door.“That was pretty selfish.”

Her words cut deeper than the bullets ever could and he felt the overwhelming need to hang his head.“Yeah.”

“But it did some good for us, too.”

Spike darted his head up to look at her.“That’s right.”

“Is everything you do like that?”

He snorted out a laugh.“Reckon so.”

“I guess I better buy more bandages.Bye, Spike.”

When the door closed behind her, he rose slowly and began to dress himself, careful to ease the clothing on over the bandages so that he wouldn’t disturb her handiwork.Only a few hours until sunset and then he would enjoy the fruits of his labor, perhaps pick up a few of those precious commodities in his life that only money can buy, maybe get the whole lot:Booze, blood, smokes and snatch.As he ran his fingers through his hair, a long brown strand fell from his fingers and he resisted the urge to pick it up.Well, he considered as he turned on the television, three out of four wouldn’t be bad either.

~*~

The latch to Spike’s door closed under her hand with a click.

Fred stood in the hallway and allowed herself to feel anything, to give in to any trace of nervousness that might remain after being under the cold hand of a monster.

Not so bad, after all. Just a man, not even a dead man, not even cold, just room temperature.

_Just a man, a body not even inflicted with rigor mortis but just sturdy and hard in all the right places. Just a man with a fury inside that could be bad but hadn’t been, at least to me, just a man who had been caged inside as well as out._

Instead, she felt calm. Accomplished.

The sudden voice at the stairwell changed all that.

“Fred, what are you doing?”

Angel’s voice hit the middle of her back like the crack of a whip, making her jump. The bloody pieces of metal in the tray she held rattled guiltily. Busted. But why should she feel that way? She’d done something good. He walked quickly up the stairs and to her side.

“Angel,” she turned around slowly, willing her hands not to shake. “I just –“

“Had the overwhelming need to play doctor?” he finished, grabbing her shoulders. “Are you okay?”

“I-I’m fine,” she faltered, flushing under his attention. “Spike, he got shot by those security guards and I knew Cordy wouldn’t do it, so I figured…”

“You figured wrong,” he said flatly, staring into the tray. “Fred, I don’t like this.”

“Somebody had to!” she insisted. “You can’t just leave him there to bleed and what if there’s infection?”

“Vampires don’t get infections, Fred,” he said softly. “But I have to say, it’s nice that you think of us that way.”

He squinted at her and reached a hand up to her face. She flinched and his hand cowered back. But the curious fingers returned for another look, tipped up her chin to the light and turned her head from side to side. Fred felt her cheeks burn hot from the inspection, while her hands turned as cold as the icy metal of the tray she held.

“No marks, you can look, no marks,” she mumbled. “He didn’t even get bumpy, Angel, promise. He’s safe, like you said.”

“He’s far from that,” Angel said with a snort. “Look, Fred, there’s ‘safe,’ okay, where someone you don’t know can live down the hall from you and mean you no harm, just a…ah…”

“A neighbor,” she prompted.

“Right,” he said with a smile of relief. “Not ‘safe,’ like you should be spending any length of time with him.” His eyes moved across her face wildly, as though a million scenarios of what could’ve played out behind Spike’s door flashed through his mind.

“I had to do it.”

“He would’ve healed, Fred.”

“I needed to know,” she whispered. “How safe. For me.”

Angel’s eyes widened slightly. “That can change in a heartbeat.”

“I know it.”

He frowned, the lines around his mouth indicating that he didn’t like it but he couldn’t stop it. Or stop her.Hey, they all wanted her to get out of her room more and this is what she chose.

“Do you…” He paused. “Did you find out what you wanted to know?”

She nodded vigorously. “He’s all tied up inside. He won’t try nuthin’.” The wideness of her eyes sought his. “Promise.”

His eyes shrugged away. “Still doesn’t mean you should be seeking him out. He’s a killer. Let him be that. We’ll need it,” he frowned, “for the work we do. But take it from me, Fred: there’s nothing more a vampire can do for you.”

_Oh, I saw what he can do, he can do everything a man does, everything you can do, he can do maybe even better._

Angel jerked the tray out of her hands. “I’ll clean this up,” he mumbled as he walked back to the stairs.

“Sure you will,” Fred whispered. “That’s just like you.”


	5. Chapter 5

“Then once the Nester queen charged, the whole thing became rather a blur,” Wesley told Fred between sips of tea, gesturing carefully with his bandaged arm. “Although I could swear I recall Spike throwing himself in my path.”

This is what Fred had to look forward to after the Investigations’ team nights of hunting: the post-battle recaps that could never substitute for the real thing. Yet they were the only way for her to remain somehow a part of the action. She still hadn’t decided, really, how involved she wanted to be.

For now, she appreciated the story and shook her head in wonder. “Wow, it’s so exciting.”

“Yeah, and the really exciting part was when several of her hatchlings decided to join the party and defend her honor,” Cordelia added, stirring sugar into her cup. “Near death experiences are always good for that special rev to the heart.”

“So is that why you had your crossbow cocked with no place to go?” Gunn asked her. “That adrenaline rush?”

“Huh?” Cordy asked blandly. Fred noticed how she wouldn’t meet Charles’ eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m saying that whatever you had your arrow pointed on, it wasn’t the queen.”

“So Spike totally proved himself, then,” Fred said, glancing at them. “He can really work and play well with others, like Angel said.”

Wesley looked to Cordelia as if for guidance, and then turned back to Fred. “On the contrary, what we’re considering is that Spike took no concern for his own life in the protection of mine. It was less an act of heroism and more an act of…”

“Despair,” Fred finished quietly, pushing her cup of tea away.

Above her, she could feel their eyes shift back and forth again.

“Actually, I was going to say dementia, possibly brought on as a side effect of the chip…which reminds me, I had a valuable text on brain dysfunction that’s gone missing.”

Fred felt her shoulders tense.

“Oh, right, I borrowed that,” Cordelia said.

“You!” Wes replied. “You must be joking!”

“I absolutely am,” she smiled back. “Sorry, bub. No clue on where the big book of snore might be.”

Fred breathed out a small gasp of relief that she quickly turned in to a cough.“So that means Spike’s gonna help us, right?”

Cordy cleared her throat. “Fred, one night with the good guys does not a hero make. We’ll see how he does, you know?” She gazed into her cup as though studying tealeaves, leaving Fred to share looks of bewilderment with Gunn and Wes.

“Cordelia,” Wes began patiently. “Is there anything you would like to share with us?”

“Yeah, you go all vision quest about something?” Gunn added.

“Guys, it’s nothing,” she said. “Just, you know, mission stuff.”

“What mission?” Fred asked quietly. “The mission to kill Spike?”

“I’m sure that’s not what Cordelia’s talking about,” Wes cut in, and then gave Cordy a sidelong glance. “That isn’t what you’re talking about, is it?”

Fred plunged forward, seeing the whole scenario come together in her mind like the missing variables in an equation. “You kept your crossbow on Spike the whole time, didn’t you? That’s why you weren’t shooting at the queen, like Charles said.”

Gunn’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Is that what I said?”

“I must admit, that would be a masterful tactical defense,” Wes mused. “Spike could have used that as a perfect opportunity to lure us in and get us all killed by those demons. Instead…”

“Instead he saved your damn life!” Fred cried.

“Hey!” said Cordy. “I had good reason to keep the blonde bombshell locked and loaded.”

Gunn folded his arms across his chest. “Is that a reason any of us are gonna hear?”

In a blast of angry voices, the conversation erupted into accusation and defense. The sudden onslaught of sound caused Fred to draw away instinctively, wrapping her arms around herself. She had instigated this. She and Spike.

_It’s no use. We’re like nitrogen and oxygen, Spike and me. By ourselves, we’re fairly harmless but add a few sparks and we’re a poisonous gas._

“And if you’re not even gonna give him a chance, we all might as well just get the chip out.”

Three pair of eyes slammed down towards her.Damn. One of the worst parts of not living alone had to be forgetting when you stopped thinking and started talking out loud.

“Pardon me, Fred?” Wes asked. “I could have sworn you said something about getting Spike’s chip out.”

“Might as well,” Fred repeated. Even through her bitterness and her uneasiness at being the center of attention, the theory held. “I mean, ya’ll think he’s up to no good, that he can’t change, that he has ulterior motives. Get the chip out and dust him already. Then you don’t have anything to feel guilty about.”

There, she’d said it. But the person who needed to hear it most was conveniently absent. Fred had yet to find a way to communicate with Angel in L.A. as well as she had in Pylea. That cave, for as much as it had been a prison, had given her a kind of freedom, too, that she had yet to find here.

Cordy (of course it would be Cordy) finally spoke up. “I’ve gotta say, I’ve heard of worse ideas.”

“I got first dibs on him post-op,” Gunn smirked.

Wes shook his head. “Angel would never hear of it. As much as his animosity for Spike runs deep, I can’t imagine that he would purposely have the chip removed only to stake Spike immediately. It’s…”

“Cruel? Heartless? Practically inhuman?” Fred prompted.

“Yes, Fred, all of those things, okay?” Cordy said impatiently. “All of those things Angel knows from Spike, and knows firsthand.”

“When they were both evil, of course,” Wesley nodded.

“No,” Cordy shook her head. “A couple of years ago.”

“What…” Fred stood up and backed away from them. “What do you mean?”

Cordelia took a breath, flattening her palms out on the table. “A couple of years ago, Angel had this ring. Any vampire who wore it became basically indestructible. Spike wanted it. So he strung Angel up in chains, got some totally creepy sadistic vamp to do the dirty work, and got his jollies trying to torture the ring out of Angel for oh, a day or so.”

“Oh man! That’s what’s living here?” Gunn crowed. “Now you tell us!”

Fred swallowed. “You’re lying.”

“Nope. Angel tortured by Spike at the Pier: got the t-shirt, changed the dressings.” Cordy paused and shook her head slowly. “Fred, you don’t know. You just don’t know the evil that Spike’s capable of. I hope you never do.”

“Then why ever did he save me?” Wes whispered.

Gunn pointed an accusing finger at Cordelia. “I cannot believe you held out on us about this.”

At that moment, the phone rang from the lobby’s front desk. Fred, already on her feet, stumbled to answer it while Cordelia’s words wound through her head.

A couple of years ago.

The man who she helped retrieve wads of extorted (yet well earned) money, had pleasurably tortured the man who had saved her from a sure death in another dimension – the same man who had saved her only by accident in saving one of his friends. A snatch of Mark Twain came back to her then; it had never made sense when her Granddad said it, but it sure came in handy now: “If heaven is earned by the good that we do, then the dogs will enter in before any of us will.”

“Hello? Angel Investigations, we help the helpless.” She glared at the group sitting before her. “Or most of ‘em anyhow.”

“Um, hi,” said a girl’s nervous, apologetic voice. “I don’t suppose, you could maybe let me talk to Spike?”

“Well, sure, if you just hold on a second…”

“I don’t suppose you could not let on to anyone who might be there that it’s, um, a personal call?”

Fred’s hand froze on the receiver. The phantom author – Dawn. It had to be.

“There sure are a lot of people who can help,” Fred said.

“Yeah, I get it, you’re not alone. Look, I won’t take a lot of time, I just really need to hear his voice, just for a minute.”

Fred could hear it in her head, his accent, how it would bat at her heart like a cat with its nails out but not drawn. Oh, yes. Once having it, a girl wouldn’t be able to live without it.

“I’ll put you right through.”

“Thank you,” the girl said, now sniffling. “If anyone picks up, I’ll like growl or gurgle or something. Make it realistic.”

“That would be good,” Fred said quickly. “Okay, just a sec.” She pressed the hold button and thought of Spike’s room number, only a few digits off from her own. After entering the extension, she hung up the phone and could hear the trill of the ring from the second floor, then silence.

She looked up at her audience. “It’s for Spike.”

“Not collect?” Cordy cried.

“N-no…”

“Not about his adventures last night, with the money?” Wes asked. “Angel was taking care of those calls.”

“Guys, it’s just some demony thing or whatever,” Fred sighed, drifting away from them and upstairs towards her room. “Nuthin’ to cause a ruckus over.”

“Yeah, probably some shark he owes money to,” she heard Gunn chuckle. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

Tripping up the stairs to her room, she closed her door on all of their words and, on second thought, locked it behind her. Rushing over to the battered hotel bureau, she pulled the top drawer open and rifled through soft cotton until she could see the letter back in its corner, its stern folds like a reproach. She pulled it open, nearly ripping the worn spot along its center and plowed through it until she saw the words she needed to get back into her head:

“ _I know he wants to be good, I just know it. That chip started off as the only thing doing it, but I don’t think he needs it anymore – even if he thinks that he does. But don’t take my word for it. Check it out for yourself. You wait and see. You can bet your life on him._

_I did.”_

~*~

“How’d you get this number?” Spike asked in a menacing tone.

“Spike,” Dawn said. “Hi! It’s me!”

“I know who it is,” he grumbled. “Answer the question.”

“All I had to do was let my fingers do the walking. I mean, hello, you work for an agency whose business depends on advertising.”

“I don’t work for them. Never will. Ain’t this long distance for you?”

“I- I got a phone card.”

“Yeah,” he snarled suspiciously. “I bet you ‘got’ it like how you got a lot of things last year.”

“I didn’t steal it!” Dawn insisted. “Phone card fraud is, like, so way out of my league. Besides,” she said in a softer voice. “I’m not taking things anymore. I’m being good.”

“There’s a first. Though I suppose it must be easy for you now. Your Big Bad influence out of the way.”

“You know that’s not how I see you.”

“Yeah, well,” he took the empty scotch bottle out of his lap and slammed its base on the floor next to his chair. “Maybe it’s high time you should.”

“Spike, come on,” Dawn’s voice turned high and nervous. “Talk to me. You’re my best friend.”

“I may be a lot of things, Pigeon, but I ain’t that. That stringy-haired bint you run with, what’s her name, Jane?”

“Janice, you know her name is Janice.”

“Right. Her. She’s straight up your alley in the bosom pal department. Leave me the hell out of it.”

For a few silent moments, he held the line and waited for the inevitable click that would signal their lost connection.

“Spike,” she said finally.

He frowned at the receiver. “Don’t tell me you’re still there.”

“Sure I am. I know what you’re doing and it won’t work.”

The pressure started behind his eyes first, then the jab of muscles constricting his throat. “Take a hint, would you, Nibblet?”

“Sorry, but I can’t do that. I miss you too much and you pushing me away won’t change that.” Her gentle pleading reached out to him like a caress. “Don’t you miss me?”

He pressed his free hand against his forehead.“Like a fuckin’ monster.”

“I know the feeling,” she whispered, a tremor of emotion in her voice. She gave a choked laugh. “Not to mention that my card game already sucks. Xander can’t play for shit.”

“Hey, language,” he warned her. “Play it to your advantage, Bit. Just like I showed you.” He smiled faintly. “Clean him out for me, would you?”

“I’m on it,” she sighed. “You kill anything yet?”

The feeling of Angel’s finger digging into his chest came back to him in a flash of anger. “Nothing anyone will miss.”

He grabbed the phone to his jaw and sat upright. “Look, Dawn. Hearing your voice, I can’t tell you what it means to me. But I don’t think we ought to make a habit of this.”

He heard a muffled sob. “Oh, so I can miss you more and pretend like you’re dead, too?”

“I am dead, Dawn. That’s the thing, love. You should be spreading your wings into the land of the living.”

“It’s more like land of the lost here, in case you forgot,” she sniffed. “No one watches that with me anymore. Or Passions, or –”

“It’s only been a week, pet. Give ‘em a chance.”

“They had their chance,” she whispered fiercely. “They all blew it.”

Spike had heard that resolve in her before, that sound of her grabbing a thought by the throat with no intention of letting it go. He had seen it after she came down from the tower and cried herself out next to him. She held them all accountable for allowing Buffy to die. Except him – the one person who’d actually had a chance to save both girls. Who had watched that hope – along with anything solid to hold on to – careen out of reach the moment he’d dropped off the tower. In return for his failure, he received nothing but Dawn’s trust and affection. Mixed up world, that.

“They all fought for good and what could they do?” she continued, as though reading his mind. “You’re like the poster boy for evil and you almost...”

“Almost,” he interrupted gently. “Only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. If you’re gonna string them all up, you best start with me. I failed you, Dawn. Failed you both.”

He closed his eyes and saw the golden glow of the Slayer when she sailed off that tower, how he had looked up and thought that the sun had missed its rising and chose to burst into the sky instead. How the gnawing pain of his broken bones seemed to dull, just for a moment, in the wild thought that he could still catch her as she fell.

Dawn’s reply pulled him back to the present. “Not feeling failed here, thanks. Not by you anyway.”

“You won’t by them, either, given some time,” he said, hugging the phone to his cheek. “All we got is time, Bit. Best make some use of it.”

“I’m gonna call you again, you know.”

“Figured that, yeah,” he smiled.

“Promise you won’t forget about me?”

“Jesus, Dawn!” he rasped, dropping his head forwards into his hand. “Like I ever could.”

“Me too. Okay, I’m gonna save the rest of this card for next time. Bye, Spike.”

He dropped the receiver back onto the cradle of the antiquated rotary phone and steadily raised the volume of whatever inane program had managed to come through the static of the battered television. In a little while, he felt moisture on his cheeks and wiped it away with the back of his hand, rubbing the salt on the worn fabric of the chair, and tried to concentrate on the TV screen. His leaking eyes reminded him, oddly enough, of the old DeSoto’s dripping radiator: the same stale water, its presence both annoying and unexpected.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Whoops, how did four months go by? Sorry about that. Here's to sort-of regular updates, if quarantine life abides. Thanks so much for reading! Unbeta'd as always so all mistakes are mine.

Slam, bang, and the ever present whine of Cordelia from downstairs. If Spike paid rent, he’d half a mind to complain to the landlord. Noisy bunch of humans. Plenty bit of ruckus, he could care less why. She stormed off in a clear huff about Christ knew what and now the boys wanted to smooth things over for themselves, some sod-all about “catching a movie.” Wankers.

Now the thudding came closer, right down to his neck of the hallway in fact. Maybe it hadn’t been a row, maybe Angel had come to his senses and then he’d have to pack fast. But the steps were smaller, faster, more pronounced and then there was the smell. Obviously, with no trace of sexism on his part, female.

Fred’s face, florid with anger, appeared suddenly at his doorway. “Tell me you didn’t do it!” she shrieked at him, slamming the door behind her.

Startled, he actually sat up from his spot in his bed where he’d been reading, the book slipping from his fingers in surprise. “I didn’t do it,” he answered as if by rote.

“Oh yes, you did,” she breathed, voice careful and even, the breath almost timed on a perfect hyperventilate beat. “Angel. You nearly killed him.”

“Oh,” he deadpanned. “That.” His eyes panned toward the one exit in the room. He measured his chances that getting out of it without causing grave injury to Fred would be next to nil. Instead, he crossed his arms and armed himself with a deadeye stare. “Not lately. What of it?”

She took a daring step forward, so flush in her assault that he wished he could cheer her efforts. “‘What of it?’” she repeated through clenched teeth. “You almost killed him, that means you almost killed me, that’s ‘what of it.’”

Puzzled, he cocked his head at her in true query. “Which time?”

“What?!”

“You gotta understand, pet, history like his and mine, we’ve gone rounds with each other more times than I have the interest in counting.So me trying to do him in, could be one in at least a thousand.‘Course, that’s not even counting self-defense…”

Fred began to pace the entry of his room wildly and the predator in him sang to watch it.

“What do you mean, self-defense?”

“How many definitions of it are there?”Spike jutted his chin out in protest.“Dru turned me. She brought me home, in good vamp faith, mind.He started it.The campaign to put me down.”

Fred eyed him warily.“You, you almost killed him and if, if you had done it, killed him that is, then I’d still be in Pylea now, which would mean I’d be dead, surely, definitely dead by this time, ‘cause it was getting pretty close there for a while, and he saved me, of course, I never would’ve gotten caught if it weren’t for Cordelia, but then, I never would have gotten out if it weren’t for her, either…”

“You’re missing one important digit of your paint by numbers, pet,” he told her, his arms relaxing over his chest. “That being, I didn’t kill your big, fluffy puppy with the bad teeth. He lived, as he always seems to do despite best efforts. You’re at me for nothing, scratching up the wrong tree.”

She stopped in mid-stance, nostrils flared. With one arm raised, she lunged at him, a dancer’s move more than a soldier’s, all-stylish grace over tactics and he realized she held a whittled bit of stake in her hand. One of the many he’d carved in his sleepless nights since he’d arrived at the Hyperion. To be dusted with your own hand-hewn wood, by a vengeful beauty of a girl no less? That was some poetry.

She leaned into his chest and the wood pricked his shirt along with his senses. “It’s like you tried to kill me,” she said in a voice new to his ears, one well practiced with malice but not on the likes of him. “Count that as your last chance.”

She meant it. Every muscle in her body focused in on him with a crude precision to be true, but with as much scrap in her mettle and more liquor in his gullet, she might’ve gotten lucky.

He licked his lips and thought quickly. “Could be I did you a right favor, pet.”

“What?” she snapped. “How can you say that?”

“I’ll tell you. First, put that down,” he nodded to the stake she held. “Before one of us suffers a nasty splinter.” They stared at each other for a few more moments, during which she nearly convinced Spike that she could finish what she started. With a short exhale, she backed away from him and stood guard at the door.

“So tell me.”

“Can a bloke stretch his legs?” he asked, watching her warily. “Grab a smoke?” When she finally shrugged, he stood up and walked over to the bedside table, fumbled in the drawer, then put a cigarette to his lips and lit up with relish.

“What happened, after I tried to kill your knight in shining, eh?” he inhaled deeply and turned back around to Fred. “You weren’t around to see how his lot ambushed me. Stormed in and carted him off in a battered white van – not exactly a white stallion, but it served.”

He tapped his ash into an empty liquor bottle. “Nursed him back to health, Queen C did, put him back together again. You get to know a body when it’s under your hands, how you watch it break and heal.” The hand holding the cigarette shook unexpectedly and he pinched the wrapped tobacco tighter between his fingers.

“When Cordelia dropped down the rabbit hole to Pylea, I reckon your one and only Angel leapt in right after her, no questions asked. Payback for all those weeks of licking his wounds, standing by her man. Without that sort of devotion, you’d still be penned.”

Fred stood still in a combatant’s stance. “You really think Angel’s torture had anything to do with my rescue?”

Spike exhaled loudly. “Bloody hell, woman! Of course it doesn’t!” he yelled, throwing the cigarette under his boot. “That’s what I’m trying to get through to you!”

She frowned and eased back, defeated.

Suddenly, he knew exactly why she came, why she singled him out, and all that was missing were her tiny fists drumming a senseless beat of anger on his chest, like how a young sister used him to howl out her pain to the world.

“Be nice, wouldn’t it?” he said, picking the trampled butt from the floor and peering up at her from bended knee. “Having someone to blame for feeling spooked all the time?”

“I-I…” she faltered, stuffing the stake into the back pocket of her jeans. “It’s my fault.”

He crouched on the floor, elbows resting on his knees, as though trying to ease his approach. “For getting sucked into never-never land?” She nodded. “Why think a stupid thing like that?”

She choked out a nervous laugh. “I got what I wanted, you know. In the end, exactly what I wanted. Or more like it, exactly what I deserved.” Her voice hardened at the end of that last word.

“Bad and good ain’t that easy, love. If it were, I’d be dust and you’d be wrapped in diamonds and furs.”

Fred laughed hard at that, too hard, so hard she began to gasp for breath and then hiccup, then cough, her face turning pale. He sprang to his feet and crossed the room to her, guided her to the chair and pushed her head gently downwards.

“Here now, catch your breath, put your head between your legs…”

“And kiss your ass goodbye,” she croaked, but took heaving gulps of air under the patting of his hand on her back. “You do this like you got practice at it.”

“Had my share of female hysteria, yours the least of it so far, thankfully,” he answered. “You caught me on a slow night.”

Fred sat up slowly and pushed the hair back from her face. “That’s right. Your phone call. Didja have a nice talk?”

He opened his mouth, expecting something quite different than what actually came out.

“No,” he said quietly. He thought for a moment and when he spoke again, he did so carefully. “She’ll…call again. When she does, send it up, let it ring until it stops. Don’t take a message, yeah?”

“Why? I mean, she wants to talk to you, whoever she is.”

“She’s why I’m here. Best we keep that distance.”

“B-but no,” Fred began, and he knew the next words out of her mouth, any dozen of them all creaking with the same stale sentiments and none of them what he wanted to hear.

“Fred!” he barked, feeling her jump next to him and both loving and hating himself for causing it. He got to his feet and paced a quick circle, raking his fingers through his hair. “I gotta get out of here.”

“I’ll help you,” she blurted. “I-I know this demon, he’s an empath, which means a good guy, and he has connections and maybe even an extra bed, or at least a pull-out sofa…”

Spike stopped walking and considered her with a slow grin. “I’ve darkened your doorstep long enough, have I?”

“N-no! I didn’t mean that…”

His chest swelled to see how she stammered and backpedaled for him. Enough, just enough, to take the interminable edge off and more than the whiskey had managed.

“ ‘s alright, love. All I meant was, I need out for the night, or the better part of it.” He glanced at her. “Cover for me?”

Fred’s nervousness peaked, some of the flush of battle ebbing from her cheeks. “Where are you going?”

“No need to hide the women and children,” he said lightly, pulling his coat on from where it lay on the back of the chair. “Just going out for a stroll.” He pocketed the smokes and his lighter, and then turned to face her.

They watched each other solemnly and he saw a season of emotions pass over her face. She wanted to go with him. He wanted her to go with him. She didn’t know how to ask. He didn’t know how to apologize. She would stay. He would go.

“I’ll cover for you,” she said softly and left his room as quickly as she had arrived.

~*~

_Angel tortured by Spike at the Pier..._

_A couple of years ago._

_Fred, you don’t know..._

_Got the t-shirt, changed the dressings..._

_A couple of years ago._

_I guess you can see good in anybody..._

_A couple of years ago._

Fred threw the covers off and tossed in bed, her heart still beating from where she’d just been, trying to block out what had set her off. How close Spike had come to ending Angel. She’d never really know. Or know their history – how many times their roles had been reversed. Or if they had done…other things. Male muscles taut with anger and mutual disgust and yet a pulsing in place of a heartbeat, the shared understanding of what they both were, what they both needed. How well she understood.

None of them were thoughts necessarily conducive to sleep.

Most nights, she would spend hours willing her body to relax and gradually, the peace of being in her own, safe room would wash over her. She’d linger right on the edge of sleep, about to drift off. That’s when the random images from her time in Pylea would assault her mind as though they’d been waiting for such a lull to take their advantage. At the first whispers, the hint of what would follow, she’d try to shuffle the pictures, change the reel before the movements and sounds could take shape and break through. When she couldn’t, she would throw the covers back and take to the hotel on foot.

“Not gonna get up tonight,” she mumbled, twisting her pillow under her head. “Gotta sleep, gotta try. Can’t go out there.” “There” meant joining the world she’d been trying desperately to forget: the tiptoe world of animals and dark. The world of night, which had never completely belonged to her or felt real or natural. What’s worse, now she had to share it; the nights of wandering alone seemed like a distant dream with this new houseguest who measured her steps in sounds like a hunter tracking footprints in snow. Especially now, after seeing her in action. In his room, over his bed, she imagined that when he returned he might still smell the heat from her anger remaining there like a lingering incense.

What would he do about it?

“Try to sleep,” she soothed to herself. “Try to think of happy thoughts.”

_Pretty little cow, aren’t you?_ a voice hissed from the past.

“That’s not happy,” she mumbled, turning over. “I don’t want to think about that, please. I want something else.”

_You could…you could stay here…_ she heard her own words from the distance of time. An old and familiar refrain, the sound of her pleading coming through louder than the offer.

“No, not that,” she whined. “I’m tired of that one.” But the figure of her in her mind rolled around on the cave floor in a kind of ecstasy, naked save for the animal skins wrapped around her grimy, scrawny frame, her face sweaty and glowing with a languid smile.

_But you love it…you love remembering what happened here…_

“I don’t really,” Fred whispered helplessly, and rolled over on her stomach as the memory took hold of her and pulled her under.

_Is it a memory or a dream?_

“Call it a dream,” she sighed. “I always call it that.”

Dream it is then. _Dream a little dream of me…_ the voice took on a distinctly male voice, a British accent lusty and deep.

“No, not like that,” she muttered stubbornly. “Make it right. Make it how it really happened.”

_But we don’t know what really happened._

“Yes,” she moaned. “I do, I remember.”

_What did you do?_

“I wanted…I wanted to see, what would happen, what it would be like…”

_You wanted the monster. See if you could tame it. He wanted the blood dripping on your hand, he wanted you. Which did he want more?_

“Both,” she groaned to herself. “Both of them together.”

While Angel had shivered on the cave floor, she had watched as his features shifted in sleep – not into the full shape of the beast, but the glowing eyes, the protuberances of his brow and cheekbones – matched in time to the low growls vibrating in his throat. Whatever mysteries the monster inside made of his body, this part of him remained thrillingly, vigorously alive.

“Gotta stay warm,” she’d whispered to him, crawling into the nest of fur with him, watching how the puffs of his breath turned to steam in the dank air.

“Never warm,” he’d grunted in his sleep. “Dead, always dead. Cold, so cold.”

“That’s why you’re lucky you got me,” she told him. Through the thundering of her heartbeat in her ears, she eased down beside him and curled close; then closer, until she pressed up behind the full length of him. A shuddering sigh escaped her lips, while she allowed her mind to revel in the delicious sensation of another body against hers. At last: a companion, a confidante, someone who cried out for contact and acceptance as much as she had during all of those years alone. Closing her eyes, she cupped his buttocks with the tops of her thighs and let her hands stretch upward until they stopped to nestle in the soft tufts of his hair at the back of his scalp.

“There,” she crooned, stroking him absently. “Doesn’t that feel good?” He tantalized her, this strange animal-man trembling with both fear and power – his strength barely contained. Of its own accord, her pelvis began to rotate in a minuscule motion, a tiny circumnavigation against the bulk of his hips. Her mouth opened and she began her own panting into his back, the heavy immobility of his body making her bold. She realized then that she could do anything with him here and the thought filled her with a reckless abandon, causing her thighs to part wantonly as the first desperate tugs of desire pulled on her.

Who better than a beast to bring out the beast in yourself?

“It didn’t happen that way,” she tried to protest, rolling over in bed. “He was sweet…” Her voice faltered as the emotions of that night came flooding back, bringing with them the knowledge that sweetness had been the least of what she wanted from him – and the last of what she had received.

When the portal sucked her in, it pulled all of her sweetness along with it until her former niceties felt like hollow remains stuck to her in a sugary, crunchy shell. Five years it took for the sweet to get leached out of her: five years of watching hands hold out treats in bribery – only to see them snatch away and return with switches and shackles instead. Five years under their thumbs and their fists, all the while mumbling garbled prayers that were never answered. All that time spent chained, beaten, hounded, only to find out how much sweetness lied.

“Stop,” he muttered raggedly, thrusting his buttocks backwards and meeting the gentle pressure of her half way.

“Sshhh, it’ll make you feel better,” she said, moving away from him slightly to yank the burlap smock over her head until she fell back deliciously naked against the fur. “Bare skin gives off better heat.” Thud, thud, thud, pumped her heart. “You wanna feel?”

How he wanted to feel and not only that, but lick and touch and taste and take. He rolled over half-mad with confused desire and pinned her beneath him, wrenched her hands over her head and let the long nails of his claws scrape against her wrists as he held her bound. He panted, this dead body that didn’t need to breathe, making clouds over the gooseflesh of her bare skin as he sniffed her, darted his tongue out and sucked the salty film from her ribs and belly. In the firelight, the flames flickered across his face and she saw the approximate of what he hid from his friends, maybe the world even. Not the green-horned monster, but a golden-eyed devil child with glistening fangs and a heavy browed expression of unabashed lust.

“It’s okay,” she told him and herself, too, when he bowed down lower to raise her pelvis up to his mouth like a chalice from which to sip. “We’re both gonna be just fine, just fine, just…”

“Uhhhhnnnngggg,” Fred groaned in bed, her fingers finally twisting over her clitoris in the divine rhythm that her body craved. Sweat broke out on her scalp and her hand slumped between her sticky legs. She needed that.

The memories clawed at her every time she tried to look at Angel, like nothing ever happened, like they hadn’t shared those blissful moments of weakness. She couldn’t even form the words that what drew her to him the most also happened to be what shamed him the most about himself.

So unlike Spike.

She saw how Spike’s eyes had shone from the fight she’d tried to give him, like a sleeping person coming into consciousness. He wanted more, whatever she’d be willing to dole out, just to watch a body push itself to its limits.

Because it was what they were meant to do, animals. Humans, vampires…different genus and species with only a hairsbreadth of demon making wants into needs.

Angel shepherded her out of Pylea, finding her purely by accident, just like Spike said. But Pylea had yet to leave her. The man who drew her bath, who took her for ice cream, who had patiently pleaded with her to not be afraid of the killer he moved in down the hall, stood no chance against the parts of him she really wanted. Angel would always be hope unfulfilled.

Which made Spike…something yet to be realized.

The slave in her still expected shackles instead of treats – or maybe both, both of those things, both happening at the same time, with the same deliciously happy ending.

Gently, as though on a wave, she finally began to drift off.


End file.
